Guild Wars 2

Why would you need to post links ingame? And even if you do direct people to sites, couldn’t you just say “go to youtube,” or “go to the Guildwars forums,” or something else like that?

Like I said, they could cover the necessary variations on the terms, and add new ones as they show up.

I thought of a simple solution for gold farmers, apply a filter for the word “.com” in the chat filters. The gold farmers seem to link to outside web pages, and really there’s no compelling reason why honest players would have to be able to do that, so just filtering “.com” and similar terms out could make it more difficult for them to operate via map chat.

Yeah, and really Rifle and Pistol/Pistol, on an Engineer, are semi-melee. They are at least as melee as Dagger/Dagger is for an Ele. They have some middle-distance attacks, but most of their best damage attacks are designed to be used in melee range, like Blowtorch and Blunderbuss. Just because they’re guns does not mean that they’re meant to be used at long ranges.

But I do think they would benefit from a different one-hander option, if only so you could use the offhand shield or pistol with some variety other than pistol main.

Weapon swapping during combat would be way unnecessary and not only make them overpowered, but WAY overcomplicated, trying to swap between D/D Earth and Staff Fire or whatever.

That said, I definitely think that both Eles and Eng should be able to swap weapons outside of combat, in that you should be able to designate your preferred alternate weapon and switch between them as easily as hitting “~”, so long as you aren’t in a fight at the time, rather than having to manually swap them in from your inventory.

Everybody keeps saying the Engineers should get a Hammer. Engineers should NOT get a Hammer. Engineers already have five different two-hander weapon replacers, they don’t need another. Besides, most engineers don’t use two-handed sledgehammers in their work.

What Engineers should get is the MACE, a one-handed melee weapon that they can use with offhand pistols and shields. They could also use them in offhand if they like. This would also drive demand for Maces since they are very under-utilized. If they wanted to they could just migrate the Wrench powerset to the Mace skills. They could also add a Wrench model as an alternative skin for the Mace.

This would do several things. One, it would mean you wouldn’t need to take up a utility slot to use the Wrench effects. Two, it means that there would be an alternate main-hand weapon, just like Elementalists can choose dagger or scepter for mainhand. Engineer is the only class that currently only has one mainhand option. Three, it’d be awesome.

I’m no expert, so take it with a grain of salt, but my level 50 Condition Thief is mostly Acro/Trick, because part of the Condition build is applying the high damage, and the other half is surviving long enough for it to take effect. I find that the flippiness of Acro is vital to this.

What I’d like to see on bleeds (playing a bleed-heavy Shortbow Ranger and DD thief myself) is to have “overflow damage” for bleeds. Basically, if the mob in question already has 24 stacks on him, and you apply three in a row, then the first stack sticks normally, and the last two “overflow,” dealing half their total damage instantly. This means if you’re applying a 25 damage per tick bleed over five seconds, for 125 damage total, it would instead deal 62 damage directly (twice, in this case).

This allows Bleeders to continue contributing, and would only be a factor in extreme situations like boss battles anyways, because a single character applying 25 simultaneous bleeds is fairly tricky (I think my max was closer to 18).

This should also be a factor for poisons and burns, which stack for duration but presumably end up stacking into the several minute range on boss fights, so instead once the duration exceeds perhaps 30-40 seconds (which is plenty to kill a non-boss mob), subsequent stacks could instead just deal direct damage equal to half or less the total amount.

I was also underwhelmed by their traits. I can’t wait to max out my Thief’s traits, but I just can’t get interested in the Ranger traits, especially the peak ones.

Yeah, it would not be balanced to let people teleport across jumps. That’s not the point of the abilities.

A lot of these responses are confusing. You guys do realize you can only have 3 utility skills on your bar at once, right? The whole “Use scorpion wire and shadowstep to close gaps and blinding powder and shadow refuge and then maybe a devourer venom to immobilize…” makes sense if you’re making the argument that there are spells in existence that immobilize, shadowstep, and etc. But obviously they can’t all be equipped at once…

No, but they give you options when deciding which ability you like. I have Ambush, Roll, Shadow Refuge, and Buddy Thieves on my bar, and that’s plenty.

I don’t know, I’ve never turn down a buff to the class, and I do think it can be very paper-thin sometimes, but I still love my Thief, favorite class in the game. I’m currently running a level 45 Acro/Trickery Condition based DD/Short Thief, and think I’m quite powerful and useful to have around. Stealth is not super useful, but doesn’t need to be, these are not sneaky thieves, they are ninja thieves, they kill things, not wander around behind them.

Overall, I really do think you should play another class. Not permanently, maybe, but at least for a bit. You might enjoy it more, but more importantly you’d get some perspective. I’ve played a bit of every class, and have several at near the same level as my main, and I can tell you that your impressions of how other classes perform do not apply when you’re on the other side of them.

The primary Steal ability is just annoying. Too random. I only use it because it grants me free Initiative with the traits I’ve got, and eventually poison too. I would actually prefer that it just do that and not give me some random attack to make in my chain.

I don’t know that “megaman stealing” would be the best way to fix Steal. Personally I’d just prefer they changed it to giving you a specific buff. For example, instead of “stealing feathers” and then using those to blind and stealth, if you Stole from a bird it would just passively apply stealth to you. If you Stole from a Char it might apply Fury to you or something. If you Stole from an Ettin it would apply Might. The effect would be instantaneous and would instantly put Steal back into cooldown so that you could use it again asap.

I might spec into it to give a group-wide stunlock every 45 seconds. How is that bad? It’s only bad because you don’t want to change your spec.

The problem is, from the sounds of it, a fully specced Basilisk build might be an 8-10/10 ability, maybe. Fair enough. But unspecced, it’s like a 1-2/10 ability, practically useless. This alone is not good. An elite skill should always be at least a 5/10 ability, even if you have completely the wrong specs for it. They can leave the effects it can have fully specced alone, but they need to buff up the effects it has in its vanilla state.

Keeping Swiftness up on an Engineer or Elementalist is a serious pain, the 25% passive on Thieves is much more useful. Plenty of other classes don’t have anything close to either. And while yes, some classes have abilities that leap across gaps (like Heartseeker), I would never use these abilities during a jump puzzle because they are too unpredictable. Any gap you’re meant to jump, you can jump using. . . jump.

I’ve been playing in the Fields of Ruin map lately, and every time I come across an escort event, it’s broken. This happened first several days ago in a missing where I was meant to escort a Sylvari and some fernhounds away from some ogres, but she just stood there next to a tent in their camp and showed no signs of moving anywhere even after several minutes. Then today I saw one to escort a Separatist, and he was just standing around in the middle of a field. Then later I was told to escort some human diplomat to the meeting from the human summit camp, but she was just standing around.

I have no idea where these missions start from or end at, just that they weren’t moving. I tried talking to them, I tried training mobs to them to get some interaction going, neither got them walking. I did bug all three situations while in game.

Ravel – kinda, but I disagree – You would still need to ensure your pet doesn’t die to keep the stacks, which would require skill.

Yeah, agreed. The cost of this ability should be that you can’t treat your pet as disposable. There are plenty of Rune abilities that give you stacks of “something” that disperse when you die. This is a fine balance. Removing the buff stacks when you swap pets or just for swimming makes this ability too annoying and pointless. The only other alternative I can see would be to make it build multiple stacks per kill, or one stack per attack that lands, so that you can rebuild it to full much more quickly.

As far as I know, no teleport in the game allows you to travel to a point that you can’t jog to. If you have to jump, you get stopped at the edge (although you can teleport from tip to tip of a short “U” shaped cliff or something). The only ability that can teleport across genuine gaps it the Mesmer portal, but it can do this because you have to reach the destination to set it, meaning you have to earn it before you can burn it.

Thieves are highly mobile, plenty mobile.

If you think any skill is bad, it’s because you are bad. This needs to be the motto of Guild Wars 2, which is a skill based game.

In a perfect world, that would be true, but this is GW2, and while it’s great, it’s not perfect. There are some abilities that are underestimated, and some that are underpowered. This one is a little of both, but it could use some fix’in.

But then you take the trait which applies your venoms to allies nearby. 5 people, with 2s of making a completely-100%-helpless player each. Pick any target, everyone attacks, and that person is locked down for 10 seconds, unable to do anything until they are dead.

But then you have another Thief with the same build on your team. He pops the same Venom after your first kill, and you move on to the next target, 10s stunlocking the next player. Around this time, with your traits, the Venom is almost done with it’s cooldown – and you pop it again! Take 3 Thieves like this, and you will literally wipe the floor with any team or group. Take 5 Thieves! See Basilik nerfed in a week.

Yes, it’s very nice if you devote yourself entirely to it’s whims, but even then, whatever. Instead, you could have Buddy Thieves AND a build that isn’t entirely reliant on a single weird stunlock combo, because you can put those points into other things, more useful things. Instead of having a second identical thief, you could have a different classed character, or a thief with a different build.

The ability should be good on its own, without having to go to such lengths to counteract its downsides.

No, it wouldn’t, because it’s just a weaker way of saying the same incorrect thing, which is that “Basilisk Venom is the least useful elite in the game”. There is a big difference in saying that a skill like BV is “niche” or “limited in use” (correct), and saying “OMG WORST ELITE IN GAEM”, which is just senseless hyperbole.

Well, I used better grammar. You seem pretty firm on that point though. Which Elite skill is worst then? One of them would have to be. I vote Basilisk, what’s your counter? Elixer X? That at least turns you into a “rampaging brute,” or perhaps a whirlwind. I don’t know how strong those are, but they’re at least cool.

It’s not that I’m opposed to having a weak ability, there are plenty of abilities I have no interest in using, but plenty more that I do use so that’s ok. My problem with BV is that 1. It’s the only one we can use underwater at the moment (even though Buddy Thieves should work fine underwater), and 2. that it’s too expensive to be so bad. If this were in the 1-3 point range, fine, but if the price is 10 points, it should be worth at least 4.

It would be nice if there were colored marks along their HP bars or something. But yeah, this is NOT a problem, Heartseeker already had a lot going for it, and still does, it’s just not quite as hard hitting.

The trick is to DB before the attack hits. You’re right that as a “wait for it. . . wait for it. . . dodge!” move it blows. Do not use it like that. There is a dodge for that. Rather, you stay constantly in motion, Dodge, Dodge (to build Might stacks and drop caltrops), DB, DB, DB, 1, 1, 1, DB, Dodge, DB, etc. You aren’t dodging any specific attack, but you spend so much time in “evade” mode and/or behind the target that most attacks won’t hit you anyways.

I practically only use Deathblossom, it is awesome.

We need more/better medium armor hoods. So far the only ones I’ve seen are the Anonymity Hood, which only thieves can get and only if they start with it, and the Whispers hood, which looks silly on Asura and is really more of a ninja mask than a hood.

Light armor has a very good one, the Ascalonian Clergy Cowl, and I would wear it even for a stat reduction but Thieves and Rangers aren’t allowed to wear light armor, so please add this as a medium armor style as well. I’m just tired of wearing either bandito masks or Musketeer hats.

The grenade kit is great at low levels. I didn’t use them on my beta character, but I was just using them exclusively on my level 6-12 alt over the past few days, and he was doing great damage. He’s far better at taking three guys at once than taking three guys in a row, and you have to be good at fast-casting ground effect moves, so it’s more complicated than most weapons, but I don’t think I’m lacking in damage at all.

To be honest, hyperbolic statements like “Basilisk Venom is the most useless elite ever” aren’t very constructive, nor do they provide terribly good feedback to the developers who read these forums.

Would “Basilisk Venom is less useful than any other Elite Skill in the game” be better? I think they get the point. The rest of the thread is where the details get ironed out.

Does Basilisk Venom have issues? Sure. But as others have pointed out, it was previously nerfed for a reason, which was being the centerpiece of a very scary build that locked people down for up to 10 seconds with no option of stun break. Obviously, something had to be done about that.

I can understand needing to nerf an overpowered combination of factors, but they really should figure out a way to nerf that combination, while giving some usefulness to the vanilla version of the skill. Wouldn’t the easy solution be to make it so that Stone doesn’t stack for duration? That way, one use of it, ten, it wouldn’t matter, you’d only be able to get the same duration out of it as a single use. Since this is the only ability that grant Stone, it wouldn’t harm other skills either. Of course, they’d then need to make the vanilla ability better, with a longer innate duration, and a lower casting time.

Perhaps the solution would be to stack effects. Give it 1 second of Stone, AND three seconds of Stun, AND five seconds of Immobilize, AND ten seconds of Cripple, or something along those lines (meaning that as each wear off their options would be improved, but it would still reduce their effectiveness for a decent amount of time). That way, enemies/players with stun-breakers could only be stunlocked for one second, no matter what, but then it could offer a solid amount of overall CC effects that would be very handy.

My mains are a Thief and a Ranger, both of which use their bows, and I like the default shots on them just fine. I see no reason for a “combo” sequence.

I do sometime hear the audio cue, sometimes not. The “helpful suggestions” you guys give are perfectly fine for solo play, but my pet never dies in solo anyways. In a general melee, with dozens of characters involved, it’s far too subtle to notice my pet “slinking back” or its HP bottoming out for a split second, or my character saying something (amongst numerous sound effects). This needs to be very simple, a big flashing red light in your face that tells you the pet is dead dead dead, do something about it. Subtlety has no place here.

I agree, I never even considered using this ability for example this reason. It’s pointless.

This was definitely a good move on their part. Rezing pets in combat took way too long, if you were able to do it, fine, but you were wasting everyone else’s time because by the time it came back you could instead have been doing a ton of damage and had him swapped out, recovering, and almost ready to go by that point.

The important part was how annoying it was in a large fight to have multiple dead pets wandering around, being confused for dead players at best, getting in the way of looting or environmental interactions at worst. That needed to change.

Yeah, utterly pointless.

Yes, there are plenty of ways to trait up your Initiative gain. Making it easier to achieve would be ridiculously unbalanced, it would basically be like removing the cooldown from the other classes moves. If you spam out all your attacks and can’t do anything else, and that’s not what you meant to do, then you’re doing something wrong. Either moderate which moves you use and how often, or get used to hit and run play.

I agree with a lot of your points, although I will note that I main a Raven, and he’s not that squishy when I have ten points in Beast and the Regen signet up, He can tank Champions sometimes. Also I think that the Speargun is one of the better underwater weapons I’ve used, certainly better than the Thief and Warrior versions, way better than the Engineer ones. There does seem to be an overall game balance issue though between ground and water combat, an enemy in the water just seems harder to kill sometimes than an equivalent enemy on land.

Currently you cannot put a trait VII or higher in the first slot. Could it be made so that once you reach the second tier (Master), the traits get unlocked and you can use them in any of the previous slots as well? This would make it possible for me to, for example, have +70 precision for allies and piercing arrows at level 40.

This would be unbalancing. The whole point of the existing system is so that at level 80 you can have one T3 skill, one T2 skill, and one T1 skill, or you could have one T3 and two T1, or two T2 and one T1, or three T1, or whatever, but you’re not meant to have two T2 skills at level 40, or three T3 skills at level 40. They are balanced to force you to choose.

I second this notion. My thief has a permanent 25 speed increase from a signet AND can activate Swiftness for two seconds on a dodge (which I can do fairly often). I don’t use Axe/Horn in combat, and would prefer to have a different combo in my second slot, but can’t take it out because otherwise my Ranger moves too slow. This has nothing whatsoever to do with combat maneuverability, so the various effects that grant Swiftness in combat only (like the weapon swap trait or the Bird’s Swiftness buff) are useless here. This is about being able to get from A to B faster than the default speeds.

If necessary they could make the effect only work outside of combat (but there should be some lesser effect that would be available in combat).

I’d like to second the idea of some solution to the 25 stack cap on Bleed damage (and for stacking limitations on Poison and Burn conditions) in major boss battles. I don’t know that the cap should be removed, but it needs to be replaced with something. I think the best solution would be that if you try to apply a 26th stack of Bleed, or if you drive the duration of a Poison or Burn stack above a certain time amount, then instead of dealing X damage over Y time, you would just deal direct damage equal to maybe half that. So like if you deal 10 dps over 5 seconds, you’d just deal 25 direct damage instead. This effect could be designed to only apply to Veteran mobs and above if necessary, or even Champion and above if absolutely necessary, but I think it would work fine for all mobs, because if you can get 26 stacks of bleed on a regular mob then it deserves to explode.

It would be important though to make sure that this effect would proc on a per-application basis, not just per move, so that if you use Death Blossom, which applies three stacks of Bleed, when a boss has 24 stacks on him, you would apply a single normal stack (which would in our example do 50 damage over five seconds), and then two of the 25 damage instant-procs with the second and third hits of the move.

But then it slowly heals itself back up so that can be incredibly confusing cos they’re in their own “downed” state until we res them and get their normal HP bar back..

Exactly. If you don’t notice the split second that they die, their HP will be something above zero (keep in mind that my build includes so far 10 points in the Pet line, with the Regen signet), it usually fluctuates between 5-25%, because they tend to stay enough in harms way that they keep taking damage, and yet can’t attack or use their special effects so they’re useless.

It used to be when your pet died, it got a little “rez me” icon above its head. This was obviously annoying, and rarely told where is was in a general melee anyways, and it’s gone now, so that’s good. But now I have NO idea whether my pet’s dead or not, especially in a big pitched battle. They usually stay at high health and then plummet to zero really fast, so I can miss when they actually die and then not notice that they’re dead.

I have a solution though! Put a big red “X” over their picture on the toolbar. Simple. Then I know, this pet’s dead, swap him out. Anything else like that would be fine, a bit UI feature on the toolbar of some kind to indicate a dead pet.

I think it’s worth having as a passive alone, I mean, the Ranger equivalent only offers 10% speed buff, not 25, so we can count our blessings. That said, I only use this skill when traveling or playing casual, if I’m gearing up for a tough fight I swap it will Roll for Initiative, which is far more useful in a fight. For basic maneuverability the 2s Swiftness granted by dodging is plenty.

I use a Raven, I have a lot of pet buffs and regens going so it doesn’t die too quickly and I like its damage and Blind effect. I use a Black Bear as my alt, because it tanks well and has a decent attack. I would use an Atroducus or Murelow because they have even better effects, but they are too ugly.

Could they be? It would really be nice if rare craftables (along with refined materials like dowels and inscriptions) could be put into the collectibles area. They tend to really pile up after a while, and the bank space is fairly small to be shared between five characters.

That’s weird, I’ve had 11/10 before. I’ve never had it incapable of receiving messages.